"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance" — Steve Ballmer's 2007 spectacular earns him only ninth spot on Alex Bracetti's collection of the 25 craziest things that tech industry chiefs have told reporters. [Complex via Daring Fireball]

  • rob_cornelius

    oh look another slideshow… bye

  • Jeremy Wilson

    I couldn’t read past 18 due to the lack of a “Next” button.

    • http://ae4rv.com/ royaltrux

      There’s a next (arrow) button. And also several typos.

    • cellocgw

      I’d rather have a Next computer than a Next button.

  • Lobster

    Most of these quotes aren’t “dumb.”  They just ended up being wrong.  

    • cellocgw

      Yeah, they were dumb.  Because you’d hope that people in charge of developing wicked awesome new tech would know better.   Reminds me of 1950′s sci-fi stories in which interstellar warp-drive spaceships were run by engineers using slide rules to calculate their course.

  • Halloween_Jack

    26. “Hey, guys, let’s take this simple list and make it into a slideshow with pictures that take forever to load, because that’s what the public wants, right?”

    • septimar

      “take forever to load”? They loaded immediately for me. You must have a really subpar connection.

  • http://www.misscellania.com/ MissCellania

    25 pages? When they could have done it like this? http://listverse.com/2007/10/28/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/

  • Sigmund_Jung

    Corporate heads make millions, but have to go on record saying the most absurd things because they fit the company’s strategy. Just look at how LaPierre makes a fool of himself every time he has to defend NRA.

  • bkad

    The quotes that required predicting the future are unfair. No one can predict the future, and unlike us politically/fiscally unimportant people, CEOs don’t have the option of keeping their mouths shut — they are expected to weigh in on the technical and business issues which impact their companies.

    The quotes that are petty malice and arrogance, though, there is no excusing.

  • http://mattdm.org/ Matthew Miller

    I hate to back up Bill Gates, but I think it’s pretty likely he never said that. The 640kb limit isn’t due to a decision he made, but due to where IBM decided to put the memory used by hardware drivers.

    A couple of the other quotes aren’t dumb at all. The Asus guy predicting that US-based PC makers will fail within 20 years? Who’s left? Dell and HP? How’s that goin’ for Dell?

  • captain_cthulhu

    amirite or amirite?!?!

  • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

    SUMMARY – shittastic slideshow containing approximately:
    - 12 quotes about Apple by CEOs talking smack
    - 5 by Google’s Schmidt disregarding user privacy
    - a couple by Zuckerburg
    - a few decent ones like Gates claiming in 2004 that spam would be dead within a couple of years and Bob Metcalf (co-inventor of ethernet) promising in the mid-90s to eat his words if the internet weren’t dead in a year (he later blended the speech into a drink and consumed it on stage).

  • Petzl

    It’s somewhat unfair to quote balmer.  his job is to compete with apple.   when is pepsico ever going to say something approving of coca cola?

    • http://twitter.com/amanicdroid Dr. Chronobiologist

      Whenever needing material to round out a list of stupid CEO quotes, Balmer is the goto. He just says so many dumb things in such an overblown manner.

      But I agree with the underlying idea of your statement.

    • cellocgw

      The point is that Ballmer — or his alter-ego in Bizarro World — should know enough to STFU and stick to actual competing. Like, say, understanding why your products suck and how that might be fixed. 

    • http://twitter.com/beep54orama B E Pratt

       Actually, it is SOOO fair to quote Ballmer because the man is a raving loon. Check him out on YouTube. He’d be funnier if he wasn’t actually so damn scary.